As I was viewing the demo of the latest WebTrends 9 release, I started to experience those familiar conflicted feelings. I liked some of what I was seeing: a further improvement to report presentation, real time alerts for rule-based changes in traffic. But at the same time, I was thinking, "where's the beef, where are the improvements I thought I was going to see on the OnDemand analyst tool which is still pretty much 8.5"the core part of the product? Isn't this what WebTrends said they were going to present in the Fall 09 release?"

So, I asked.  The answer I got from WebTrends: There are 3 audiences they're trying to address: the senior manager, the business user, and the analyst. Who's the main target with this release? The senior manager and business user.  WebTrends' rationale is that this is the base that they must win over...and they must give tools to their core customers (analysts and hybrid marketers/analysts) to do a better job of pushing WebTrends out to the greater enterprise. 

There's a certain logic to this argument that I understand. One of the biggest issues that larger organizations have with analytics is getting reports out to people in a timely and coherent manner so that they can use the data to make decisions. You'd think that after this many years, it would be pretty straightforward.  It's a gap that Google Analytics has done a wonderful job at exploiting. But getting reports out to lots of people still doesn't address the gap of being able to understand how to use the data. Once your managers, marketers and content writers understand the basic “out of the box” reports, they want analysis that guides their decision making. So, by following Google's lead, WebTrends is solving only half the problem.

If you're an experienced WebTrends analyst or have one on your staff, there's a decent argument for staying the course with WebTrends and seeing what they come up with in February at their user conference. Based on the improvements already made in the product, using the new interface and alert system will help you with report distribution and doing very basic traffic analysis.

On the other hand, if you’re managing a WebTrends installation and folks aren’t using it, I’m not sure Analytics 9 will address the issue enough for you to justify a business case for continued use of the product. Of course, the same could be said of any fee-based solution, but WebTrends is making a much stronger pitch to this level of user than the other fee based vendors.

As I described in a recent post, there are a few interesting new offerings that address business questions based on analytics data. I anticipate that there will be growth in point solutions that focus on automating the extraction of actionable information out of web analytics data.  These solutions don't ask you to analyze data; they tell you what you need to know. As this level of automation becomes "smarter", the need for web analytics reporting, could quickly lose currency.